"Since this issue affected some of the chipset units shipped and produced in the fourth quarter of 2010, the company will take a charge against cost of goods sold, which is expected to reduce the fourth quarter gross margin percentage by approximately 4 percentage points from the previously reported 67.5 percent," Intel said.

The quad-core late 2009 iMac was the first generation of iMacs to use the Core i5 and Core i7 chipsets. Then came the quad-core mid-2010 iMac which uses the second generation of Core i5 and Core i7 chipsets.

Are you really, really sure that the current quad-core iMac is not affected, especially the models manufactured and sold during the months of November 2010 and December 2010?

The quad-core late 2009 iMac was the first generation of iMacs to use the Core i5 and Core i7 chipsets. Then came the quad-core mid-2010 iMac which uses the second generation of Core i5 and Core i7 chipsets.

Are you really, really sure that the current quad-core iMac is not affected, especially the models manufactured and sold during the months of November 2010 and December 2010?

A new generation of chips is a bigger jump in technology than what is seen in the 2010 iMacs. The support chips being mentioned in this discussion are for the Sandy Bridge series of chips.

By the way though I make light of Intels goof this really isn't a big deal. They where likely pushing harder than they should have been. Likely this is due to AMDs advancements with Fusion. competition is good as long as you don't become reckless. In this case I don't think Intel has been reckless as these types of failures aren't always easy to detect.

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It will be very interesting to see how Apple proceeds here. If they follow conventional design they only need two SATA ports. Since it appears that two ports are fine it looks like many of the Mac Books could roll with this processor. However if Apple does as I hope and adds multiple Blade SSD slots to the pro MBs then they will have a problem. SATA is very important to fully exploit near term SSD performance potential.

The machine that has the fewest issues would be the Mac Mini. It could easily be updated to Intels leading edge processor due to it's use of only two SATA ports. Of course the other issue with video contra indicates it's use on this platform.

In any event there still appears to be an inventory draw down of MBPs going on. This leads me Apple will simple use the SATA 3 ports and not worry about unused hardware. This is no different than ignoring unused USB ports or PCI-E lanes.

This means that if you only use two SATA ports in your design, and the others are never available, you aren't affected. This should mean that once Intel has dual-core Sandy Bridge chips available, Apple can ship MacBooks and Mac Minis using them, with the current chipset design.

All Apple products can be updated to Sandy Bridge right now even with this defect. The iMacs and the MacBook family only need two SATA ports (HDD and ODD), so Apple can just use SATA 3 and give us faster drives.

By the time the Sandy Bridge Xeons exist, this'll be fixed for the Mac Pro.

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Originally Posted by gerald apple

Why would anybody want a defective chip in their MBP? this is a smuck.I rather have the Core 2Duo.

It's just the logic board, and it's just SATA ports on the logic board. For Apple's purposes, they can use these products as they are right now and see zero defects over their life.

Every chip of any significance has had an errata sheet. Often a sheet for every new steping. There have been very few bug free chips out there over the years, you simply are not aware of all the different defects a chip may have. Just look at all the issues there have been with Intels integrated graphics.

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Originally Posted by gerald apple

Why would anybody want a defective chip in their MBP? this is a smuck.I rather have the Core 2Duo.

I'm not sure why there is a huge demand for the latest and greatest here. Certainly Sandy Bridge "can" perform much better than Core 2 but so can many of AMDs chips. Ultimately Core 2 isn't really that bad for many users.

Personally the attraction that I see in Sandy is the additional cores available at a very nice power point. I'd rather a computer save me energy while operating and that is a big draw for these new generation of chips. As to actually buying the hardware, it is often best to let early adopters take the arrows launched from bugsville.

Even the AIRs have gone through a few software patches already. These are really good machines and an excellent value, but like all new hardware need a period of stabilization. You might say those fixes are software patches which would be correct, but software patches are often used to fix issues with hardware. Or more correctly work around hardware issues, you as a user never really know what a patch or software update is doing. Certainly most fix software bugs but they are issued for other reasons too.